[autumnandbrett]

We have had a smaller tank with seahorses for several years, 6 months ago we moved all to a 55 gal. Then I thought it would be great to add things to it. Now I have 2 seahorses that seam very happy but I also have a toadstool, a brain coral, mushrooms, feather dusters, Purple worm anenamie( we have this separated from the rest), we have a false pecula (not sure of the spellings for some of these)last but not least we have algae lots and lots of algae. We were doing great with all of it until last week we put a stronger light on our system we had a pretty good one and all waswell, what were we thinking. We have about a 2" live sand bed with 20 lbs or so of live rock. We have a skimmer running a penquin bio wheel filter made for a 55. Now we have algae everywhere, growing off the back glass, rocks are covered and the sand all of a sudden developed the black algae. We are just not sure of how to deal with this. We have started as of yesterday leaving the light off, he read that somewhere, well if we do that they don'tthink any of the these animals get fed well. We have read about cutting the hours that the light is on and we are thinking about changing out water and brushing the algae off the rocks and clean all algae off throughout the tank (i think if we do that we lose our copepods) Has anyone got a suggestion. Oh, we do have four powerheads two on both ends. I want to start a refugium in a 30 gal we have but we have 2 freshwater tanks that we are currently trying to sell to have room for the refugium. So, we are hoping anyone or everyone can give us some good suggestions so that we dont lose what we have. Thanks yall!!